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Did We Lose the Privacy War?
eihab writes "I've been a fanatic about my online privacy for the last few years. I've been using NoScript and blocking Google Analytics, disabling third-party cookies, encrypting IM and doing everything in my power to keep data-miners at bay. Recently, I've been feeling like I'm just doing too much and still losing! No matter what I do, I know that there's a weak link somewhere, be it my ISP, Flash cookies, etc. I've recently gotten AT&T U-Verse, who, according to their privacy statement, will be monitoring my TV watching habits for advertisement purposes. I'm extremely annoyed by that, yet I love the service so much and I don't think I can cancel it. I just can't take this anymore. I have nothing to hide, but I do not want to be profiled and become member #5534289 in a database somewhere that records everything I do. I know I'm not that interesting to anyone, but the idea of someone being able to pull up everything about me with a simple SQL SELECT statement and a couple of JOINS makes me cringe. One of the reasons I hate data mining is that data security is not understood and almost non-existent at a lot of places. Case in point: I changed my life insurance two years ago, and the medical firm that conducted my health screening was broken into and computers with non-encrypted hard drives and patients' data were stolen. That medical firm didn't really need my SSN, but then again neither did AT&T when I signed up for U-Verse. Am I just too paranoid? Is privacy dead? Should I just give up and accept the fact that privacy is not the norm anymore (like Facebook's founder recently said) or should I keep fighting the good fight for my privacy?"
I am member #5534289 you insensitive clod!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You are agreeing to give up your privacy. You are not losing - you surrendered.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
It seems that the only solution is to add so much noise that data miners will have a really hard time filtering out the real data.
Here is a start.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Given how interconnected our world is, if you want to participate, you have to do it in public. You have to connect to someone else's machine, hook up to someone else's fiber, talk to someone who you can't immediately trust, and you have to do it in the open.
That is to say, SSL, TOR, NoFlash, NoScript etc, still don't have a place in our lives as geeks. Just, forget privacy.
Besides, I think we live in a world where we have obscurity through density, instead of obscurity through privacy. Billions of people on this earth, nearly a billion of them connected to the 'net. Embrace it. Eventually, if enough personal data gets out there, it may become worthless to mine it due to the sheer volume available.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
If there is a privacy war it is a war of one. You know the chef is poisoning the soup but you find it too delicious to stop eating.
Cancel your cable. War won.
This amazing new drug from Pfizer called !Prozac, pronounced Not-Prozac. It has the complete opposite effect on a human body. !Prozac, when ingested by a normal human being, it will trigger multiple-personality-disorder. Now you can use one identity for your normal law-abiding activities without any concern about privacy and data mining etc. Then you can use the other identity for nefarious, criminal and/or shameful activities. Infact the other identify can ingest another dose of !Prozac and create another personality. Recursively! Your criminal personality A does not have to know what your shameful personality B is doing. Just look at the hoops people are willing to jump through just to get prOn!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"...don't think that was a problem which the people originally started worrying about what people knew about them were concerned with."
Still trying to parse this. Will get back to you when parsing is completed... ;]
"A revolution without dancing is... a revolution not worth having"
I know I'm not that interesting to anyone, but the idea of someone being able to pull up everything about me with a simple SQL SELECT statement and a couple of JOINS makes me cringe.
Actually, we've written a stored procedure to determine whether or not you're interesting.
EXECUTE IS_INTERESTING(5534289);
Very interesting indeed.
Take off every 'sig' for great justice.
It's not the war of privacy- it's the war of privacy vs. convenience.
Facebook lets me keep in touch and aware of what my friends are doing. On the other hand, photos of me doing something that may reflect poorly on myself to an employer or other friends. I have pretty strict privacy settings on Facebook, but the reality is that something bad could easily be associated with my profile and seen by many before I could get it pulled.
On the other hand, if I didn't share quite a bit of personal info on Facebook, I wouldn't even be aware when I was tagged in a photo.
Today, people are accepting convenience at the sacrifice of some privacy. It's nice when I can call up the cable company and have them able to see what services I have, that I'm paying the bill, and the modem has the wrong DOCSIS file. On the other hand, I'm in a database that is easier to access than ever. I accept the sacrifice for convenience when I have to work with the cable company.
Or credit cards. The majority of my purchases are now associated with my SSN in a database. The ability to track my spending and have some degree of purchase security is worth the sacrifice for me, so I choose to use electronic payment.
So did we lose, giving up so much? On one hand, there are plenty of alternatives- I can buy online with a Visa Gift Card, registered to whatever name and address and purchased in cash. I can buy in cash in person. On the other hand, it's virtually impossible NOT to be in a database- even if you were to forego electricity, television, cable, etc., you'd still be in a government tax database. Someone I know got a letter last year saying "an IRS employee with your and a couple million other taxpayer documents, including your taxpayer ID number, full name, and address, lost their laptop. We'll try not to let it happen again. Here's a year of credit monitoring from one of the three bureaus, then you're on your own. Seeya!"
So, yes, to some degree we lost. It's hard to avoid changes that the rest of society is fine with. Living like a hermit in a powerless shack in the woods is still possible, but for the average person, it definitely has been eroded.
The thing that bugs me about being endlessly monitored and categorized is that it's never used to make my life better. It's only ever done to help some random corporation improve their profits by some fraction of a percentage.
If being tracked watching a TV show for a full season resulted in them going "hey, thanks for being a loyal viewer, have this X as a token of our appreciation", I wouldn't complain so much. It wouldn't necessarily have to be a material bonus, in this day and age they could simply grant access to some kind of insider info website. The possibilities are only limited by imagination.
But no. Everything I do gets dumped into a database and sold to the highest bidder. It serves no purpose but to try and get more money out of my wallet. Or if the government is involved, measure my odds of being a terrorist.
Leviticus 20:13:
"If a man lies with a man...They must be put to death."
If you are gay, and a jew, and you voted for Obama.... it's only a matter of time before the Christians who take Leviticus seriously find out where you live.
Temkin's u-verse tip... Turn off the TV using the native remote. The box stays on, and continues to stream for hours. It eventually turns off after a timeout of roughly 6 hours. But they can never be certain where I stopped watching. Just adds a little noise to their data.
In the US, they want your SSN in order to run a credit check. Want to know where the real privacy problem is: credit. It's virtually everywhere. Want cable, they run a credit check. Go to a new dentist/doctor, they run a credit check. And then try reminding these businesses that by law they have to offer another way around it. By law, the only people you are supposed to give out your SSN to is the government for Social Security and tax purposes. No one else is supposed to have access to it. The credit system is broken and required by just about everyone these days.
Oh, and god forbid you pay cash for everything and live within your means. I have 1 credit card, but I've carried a balance of a few hundred dollars for 3 months out of 10 years. Apparently that doesn't help your credit score. I paid cash for my last car and now drive "company" cars. Company provides my cell phone and cell card and I've always rented. Even then I've tended to pay the lease upfront just so I don't have to bother with it.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
For ages our privacy was protected only by the others' ability to remember. A human being can only remember so many faces and facts about other people (and himself, for that matter)...
Written records reduced the privacy immensely. Computers made the next giant leap. The only thing we can do is legislate, what the computers are allowed to memorize, but those would be merely human (as opposed to physical) laws and have serious limitations. Legal pitfalls will abound — an Evil Corporation may lease a server in a foreign locale to keep your data, for example. WikiLeaks has shown the ways around various attempts to close access to information.
Information wants to be free. Does not it?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Until you walk by an e-billboard and a loud commercial for some herpes treatment starts up.
That can work two ways. Consider the following:
You finally made it to the magical third date. You have a good idea as to what will happen, but you know she holds the cards. You took special care to clean your undercarriage and wear the underwear that has no holes or stains. You meet her at the restaurant. She is wearing something sexy! You... Are... In!
After a flawless dinner where you managed to not say anything stupid and she laughed at all your jokes, you are walking with her back to your car, hand in hand. You pass by one of the new billboards that recognizes your ID card's chip and gives you the new personal ads. You wonder what add will you get this time; WOW4? Duke Nukem Forever Expansion? XBox720? The new Android V? Nope. It looks like it picked up her card first.
Worried about your genital herpes? Try Herpago and get those bumps GONE!
We had a great evening. What, you think I'm going to let a virus filled pus pockets stop me? It's not like I get this chance very often. I'm a Slashdot user after all.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
You're being too exclusive in your list of those who wield the real power. It's not just the old money... there's plenty of (relatively) new money there too.
It's not even a small, select list. It's the ultra-wealthy -- same as it has always been. I'm not one to advocate class warfare... but it's an entire socio-economic class on the top reaping the rewards of control of the political system. Don't exclude the Bushes or the Kennedys from your list. Don't exclude the wealthy in the banking and energy industries who are relatively anonymous. It's misleading and harmful to think that the list is limited to a few families with old money -- and it makes you seem like a conspiracy theory moonbat. Far better to "Do. The. Research. Yourself." and discover that it's a wider problem with no easy scapegoats to blame.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I put virtually no effort into remaining anonymous or hiding my digital footprints, yet oddly enough I've never had the secret police bust down my door, or had any clear reason to believe that my privacy has been violated.
This just means you're an average Joe that makes no attempt to disturb the status quo, has no real power or influence and has nothing anybody in a position of power wants.
If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?
"or had any clear reason to believe that my privacy has been violated."
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Your statement seems to be almost the corollary to statements like "If you don't have anything to hide what are you worried about?" I would also suggest that you're not looking at the bigger picture.
"I also happen to believe that anything I do online, by nature of the internet, is public, and accordingly I choose not to put most of the details of my life onto it."
What is preventing your friends from doing that for you? If I have an Android phone, and I have your contact info, along with perhaps your birth date, address, email, an ID picture of you, and some other interesting details in your contact, now I've given that data to Google, haven't I? What contract or understanding do you have with Google to govern how that data is being used and protected?
----- Connection reset by beer